Kathy Loves Physics Live! Crazy Electricity Wizards of the 1700s

This is going to be one of those "facts are stranger than fiction" sort of talks. I focus on 4 different "Wizards":
- a German man named Matthais Bose who made electricity fashionable with electric kisses and bad poetry
- a Frenchman named Abbe Nollet who used electricity to move up in the cutthroat world of Versailles in France
- Nollet's American rival Benjamin Franklin (yes, that Franklin) who stole his thunder and
- an Italian genius named Laura Bassi whose work ended up accidentally leading to the electric battery!
If you want to see it live the talk on Sunday April 2, 2023 at 4 pm at 2266 California Street (California street and Webster) kathylovesphysics.eventbrite.com

[@horacejrogers4714]

I grew up believing in positive electric current but when I got to electronics school in the Army, everything was taught as electron flow. After the Army I went to Electrical Engineering school and had to start using positive current again. Franklin is one of my greatest inspirations.

[@appads]

Great presentation, Kathy! ❤️

[@h2energynow]

Watched all of Kathy Love Physics videos, She is truly an amazing teacher opening whole new worlds to me.

[@jacoblf]

Fantastic lecture. I knew most of this from previous presentations of yours. What was new for me is I now know where the joke "Jump Frog Jump!" Comes from.

[@williamgraham2468]

Thank you for recording and posting your talk here, Kathy, as I couldn't be there in person. I found it most enlightening!

[@willisfouts4838]

Wonderful lecture, young miss. Again, your love of topic shines through with the level of knowledge of a journeyman. You may, in fact, have a unique collection of facts in that noodle of yours, unrivaled. Seriously. We appreciate your effort, thank you very much.

[@leonsantamaria9845]

Exelente electricity history...👍

[@cyberista]

Dear Kathy. Please don't forget Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) who Ben Franklin used to visit in England. He was a noteworthy physician and inventor who also impressed audiences with the Galvani frog-leg experiment (mid 1700s). Among members of his audience were Percy and Mary Shelley and of course Mary went on to write the immortal Frankenstein story (this is a great thru-line for history lovers). Erasmus Darwin's house is now a fascinating museum that can be visited in Lichfield (nr. Birmingham, UK).

[@JimWorthey]

I have been interested in the history of electricity for a long time, particularly this early period, "Crazy Electricity Wizards of the 1700s." One can easily find statements about Franklin, or about Galvani and Volta, but little episodes are described out of context. How were Franklin's ideas developed and shared, and communicated to others, especially Galvani? This one lecture paints a clear picture of the step-by-step ideas along with the personalities and the flow of events. Thank you Kathy!

[@supermikeb]

She has said Galvani and followers made dead animals and people move from electricity. One dead guy even sat up and raised his hand it has been said. This is where the idea for Frankenstein came from.

[@InssiAjaton]

My father had in his library a big and comprehensive book, titled Electricity and its Use, from around 1920’s. One of the ideas I recall reading in that book was that the positive and negative were defined from electrochemical experiments. In galvanic plating, you could observe the direction the plating material moved.

[@toddhenning8304]

Great presentation, love the connections there and some people I never heard of.

[@patrickohara1653]

Fabulous lecture. Manny thanks

[@susilgunaratne4267]

Great! I couldn't stop listening to you though the story is familiar now.

[@jayernoud9334]

Kathy, thank you ❤

[@alastairchestnutt6416]

Thanks great presentation.

[@DancingRain]

Bravo! I didn't get to watch this live, but I'm delighted to have been able to watch it at 23:00 PDT. Technical glitches aside, it was a brilliant, and enjoyable presentation, as all of your videos so far have been. It's strangely wonderful, that learning the history behind electricity somehow makes it feel *more* "magical" or wondrous, and not less. My own experiments into electrochemistry feel a little less like amateurish tinkerings, and a little more like carrying on a proud tradition.

[@AmanSharma-xy9jf]

Amazing presentation!

[@josepancracioribeiro2517]

Hi Kathy ! Coming from Brazil I must say it was amazing to have the chance to attend your Book Talk and getting to know you in person! I hope you go on with your method of teaching based on history and curiosity! It makes difficult stuff easier for every science fan and student to learn!

[@croenick]

Concordo

[@maxheadrom3088]

Yay!

[@ribbonkelly]

A Wonderful presentation. EXEllent Work

[@theklaus7436]

I have missed you. Good intro

[@nitinraghorte9584]

Nice session on electricity..Thanks for this.

[@GeraldZani]

Looking forward to it.

[@jamesmorton7881]

You GO Girl ! Luv your content and smile.

[@markfischer3626]

My favorite quirky people associated with electricity had to do with the mathematics of explaining electricity. I don't know who invented them but here are three There's the guy who invented the fiction of displacement current through the dielectric of capacitor. Now we know that no current actually flows through a capacitor except for perhaps a tiny leakage current. It is after all an insulator. So the fiction that AC current does flow through it called displacement current was invented so that there would be mathematical harmony with Kirchhoff's current law. There's the guy who decided current flows from positive to negative. He had a 50-50 chance of being right. This was before JJ Thompson discovered the electron. So to this day we calculate what is called "conventional current" which is the same quantity but the opposite direction of electron flow (which BTW is called the drift velocity which as I recall is about 2 inches per second for 100 amps.) This should not be confused with the velocity of the field traveling through the wire which is the speed of light in a vacuum times the index of refraction. Finally, there's the guy who decided that electrical engineers would forever use the symbol j for the square root of minus one because they had already used up i for current. The rest of the world uses i as the right symbol. Take my word for it. Electrical Engineers are already crazy enough making a living out of something we can only infer must exist. It's my life experience that physicists are much crazier. I've yet to meet one who wasn't.

[@myuncle2]

Yes, great comment, it reminds me of that guy who decided that time can be confused with a clock, or those guys who decided that black holes exist, and those other guys who decided that they detected gravitational waves.

[@markfischer3626]

@Michael Tired Physicists have an answer for everything. When all else fails they have two fallback explanations, dark matter and dark energy. Sounds exactly like the explanations primitive tribal shamins would have used. The yin and the yang. Heap powerful medicine kimosabe. Filled with dark energy. Make you strong. May the dark energy force be with you. Two times ago when I opened the box to check on Schroedinger's cat he was dead. Next time he was alive again. 50-50 chance.

[@myuncle2]

Great lesson, next you should also write a book about the 1600s wizard, Guericke.

[@noproblem4260]

great lecture proff. Im sure this early experiments woul cause same admiration into students at primary schools today, At age 10 I had made my own compass out of a magnetizded needle hanggind on a thin sewing string enclosed in an aluminium continer of Parathion( yes, and I´m still kicking and alive, so the needle would not stick to the walls, then at 11 had my own electrometer out of aluminum paper wrapp out of chocolate bars, then tried to make my own wimshurt machine with a pair of paste records ( fail) then succsesfull at making a kelvins water electrostatic generator,still wondered about my pee spreading out sometimes with isolated shoes as the stream became dropplets, trying to figure it out how drops electrify clouds.....conclussion ended my career as a succesful EE still eager to learn more, wich you fulfill it.... sugestion.. how about a deeper investigation about babylonian jars???

[@GlennElert]

I think glass objects acquire a positive charge in these experiments. Glass is on the positive end of the triboelectric series.

[@GlennElert]

"A, who stands on wax and rubs the tube, collects the electrical fire from himself into the glass; and, his communication with the common stock being cut off by the wax, his body is not again immediately supplied. B (who stands on wax likewise), passing his knuckle along near the tube, receives the fire which was collected by the glass from A; and his communication with the common stock being likewise cut off, he retains the additional quantity received. … Hence have arisen some new terms among us. We say B (and bodies like circumstanced) is electrized positively; A, negatively. Or rather, B is electrized plus; A, minus." Person A lost charge to the glass (making them negative), Person B gained it from the glass (making them positive).

[@5Andysalive]

When Franklin was in France, he must have been well in his 70's. So the "seduction" was probably limited to the intellectual and flirty realms. I know he died at 84.

[@Kathy_Loves_Physics]

According to rumors, Franklin was more (ahem) active in his 70s then in his youth - and he was pretty active in his youth!!

[@5Andysalive]

@@Kathy_Loves_Physics this may not be the best source ever According to rumors he ran around in a thunderstorm with a kite with a metal spike :) And also the guy had a lot of enemies at the time (like the british...) and even frenemies like John Adams who probably would not have minded a few rumors. So between the hard truth of biology and the lack of (even rumored) Franklin Children in France (contraception in 1780...) i remain sceptical. We'll never know. Btw great talk. It's maybe worth mentioning that he refused to patent any invention, including the lightning rod. And that he would have been less welcomed in France i f he "helped with the french revolution" :p